Social X-Ray - Review

National Review, June 28, 1999 by Richard Brookhiser

Mr. Brookhiser, an NR senior editor, is author most recently of Alexander Hamilton, American.

Turn of the Century, by Kurt Andersen (Random House, 659 pp., $24.95)

When I go to the beach, I usually take a novel by Anthony Trollope. It is a painless way to absorb social history, and if there are 50 pages still unread by the time I come home, who cares? Once, as I looked past the book to my toes and the little slipping waves, I realized that a strange thing had occurred-I was actually interested in a character.

This year I took Kurt Andersen's Turn of the Century to the beach, and had a similar experience-a long, pleasant tickling, with a few moments of engagement, that soon subsided. A Trollope reference on page 642 (the heroine is reading The Way We Live Now) iced the parallel.

The hero and heroine are George Mactier and Lizzie Zimbalist, husband and wife, who live in Manhattan, the fading grande dame of infotainment in America. George is a journalist turned producer of TV shows, which are thought of as edgy. He is smart without knowing anything in particular and skillful without having any talent; he hails from a flyover state (Minnesota) thought to be dull, though that is not a sufficient explanation for his own dullness. The one arresting thing about him is that he lost a hand reporting in Nicaragua. Lizzie, who is more likable, runs a software company in Silicon Alley, which attracts the interest of a Rupert Murdoch figure, who also happens to be broadcasting George's hit show. In the course of the year 2000 their professional and personal lives go through a variety of ups and downs no more improbable than anything else that happens in New York, Las Vegas, Redmond, Wash., or the other cultural meridian points the book touches.

Andersen's tale has several virtues. He is a good mimic, and he captures the speech and thought patterns of computer geeks, stock traders, Minnesotans, and MAWs (MAW=Model, Actress, Whatever). In his own frictionless voice he delivers some tidy observation on almost every page. Several of his comic lesser characters are wonderful, none more so than Timothy Featherstone, a media executive of nebulous provenance and function. When the favorite dog (called Peacemaker) of the starlet of George's show dies, Timothy consoles and inspires her. "Angela? Use it. Use the grief. . . . It'll be good for the work-and you know what else, Angela? It's what Peacemaker would want you to do." The last 50 pages is a brisk extended set piece about a plot against Bill Gates, which, however, leaves George and Lizzie in the shade, as if Andersen had (not surprisingly) lost interest in them.

There is a serious thought pulsing in the ether, waiting to be brought to earth. Neither George nor Lizzie is a creator, and George is not an owner of the means of production. They are switches in the great system of information, and they suspect that what it and they do is worthless. Their intuition never leads to knowledge or action, only to depression and funk. The problem first becomes evident in a brutal scene in Las Vegas in which a drunken and exhausted George is approached by a MAW on the make who does sexy things with his maimed arm, and offers to do much more. "Exceptionally sick," George thinks. When told that he lost his hand in Nicaragua, she says, "That's in Florida, right?" which makes George think, "Exceptionally sick and exceptionally stupid." At the second half of that second thought, the reader realizes that George's first reaction was not to the entire situation, including his own dazed complicity in it, but only to the pathetic, perverted girl: Only she could be the referent of "stupid." George knows that he is playing in a little comedy of damnation, and he does not let things go any further. But he does not see that the hell tolls for him too, for he is too much a part of his own rotted world. So, one suspects, is Andersen-formerly of Time, Spy, New York, and now of The New Yorker.

This is why Andersen pulls almost all of his punches. No one really gets slapped in this book, except for the Murdoch figure, who is filmed masturbating by the camera in his PC. Murdoch is not exactly a tough target, and Andersen is too vapory to call him by that name ("Rupert Murdoch" is mentioned in passing, as another man). The flip side of the pseudo-disgust is pseudo-sentiment, curdling around George and Lizzie's marriage and children. Not all sentiment is sentimentality, one of the characters says at one point. But it is when it's bolted on in the pro forma way that Andersen does it.

The next-to-last chapter is a New Year's Eve dinner as 2000 turns to 2001. George has a new project; Lizzie has sold her company, not for the $30 million that briefly shimmered before her, but for a modest and homey $1 million. The view from the upper reaches of the greasy pole is gemutlich and cozy. The last chapter offers a dark twist, as the plane George is riding in is about to crash (though maybe it won't). Like his heroes, Andersen wants to have it every which way. So, dear Reader, what was behind the door-the Lady, or the Tiger? Give me a break.